Overlay with CV3D and DVPlayer (OS4.0 Classic)

Hi everyone!

As you might already know I have lots of troubles with my installation of OS4.0 Classic. While reading of DVPlayer in another thread this reminded me to give some kind of bug report: DVPlayer 0.65, which is delivered with OS4.0 Classic, does not work with the "overlay"-tooltype set. It just plays the video showing a black window. If I grab the window and move it around or resize it, I can see a glimpse of the current frame of the video when I release the mouse button.
Is that a fixable problem? I hope so as the video display is way too slow for even my small collection of Video-CDs without overlay. I remember using the first PPC-based video player for AmigaOS 3.1 back in 1997 (Isis PPC) on the very same computer and it supported overlay on the CV3D resulting in a much higher frame rate

Changing color depth of the Workbench from 8 over 16 to 24 bits has no effect at all (since overlay is supposed to work independently from the screen's color depth that is o.k. :) )

Regards
Ruediger

@Granada


Its a known issue that also happens with a PicassoIV and Dvplayer.

Overlay does work with Mplayer so i suggest you try that.

@Granada

There are different overlay formats, MPlayer and/or AMP2 will probably work.

Well, I believe the source of the problem is that DvPlayer uses a custom GUI inside the window, apart from the overlay, and this means DvPlayer must fill part of the window with the colour of the colorkey, to make the overlay visible. This requires DvPlayer to know what colour to fill that part of the window with, and querying that colour was not previously implemented in older drivers AFAIK. Thus the drivers have to be updated to support this new functionality. If you use a player, which opens a simple GUI-less window, then you can rely on P96 to automatically fill the window's interior with the correct colour, in which the overlay is visible.

I do have an A4000 with a PicassoIV, but I don't have a working CSPPC card on it to test this problem with OS4 to get to the bottom of this...

I know nothing about Overlay implementation in DVPlayer but, (iirc) the overlay mode made things SLOWER on most AmigaOS 3.x video players i have tried.
And keep in mind that i'm using a BVision, which i believe is faster than CV3D. Perhaps this is a BVision or a CGFX v4 specific issue...

@Amigamancer

On a BVisionPPC or CyberVisionPPC it is slower than 16-bit RGB, because those cards do not actually have overlay capability in hardware. Instead overlay is "emulated" by using the 3D engine of the GPU, mapping a texture onto polygons, and drawing the polygons many times per second. This is why it slows things down on those cards. On all other cards there is proper hardware overlay, and it can really speeds things up.

@COBRA

Didn't know that. Thanks for the explanation.